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Hold on to your seat, this is an IMPORTANT announcement byCRMGamified®…

Today, we are publicly announcing the release of the new version of our leading gamification add-on for Microsoft® Dynamics CRM, CRMGamified® 2013.

It has been an exciting time for our company, also filled with many sleepless nights since our first CRMGamified® release at Convergence 2013 in New Orleans, where we introduced a new paradigm, a solution for assisting with CRM user adoption, leaving many customers, MVPs, Microsoft team members and partners absolutely dazzled when stopping by our booth.

The new CRMGamified 2013!

Big THANKS goes to the 120+ companies in 25+ countries around the globe that have taken a chance with CRMGamified® to help them to address their CRM user adoption problems, and also helped us to build a better product.

I am so excited about all the new stuff in the CRMGamified® 2013 that I can’t wait to show you all in the series of upcoming webinars scheduled for this month. We will hold these on-line presentations on June 20th and June 27th.

Excited and curious about what we have been hiding under the lid for last several months? Let’s take a sneak peak about what is new….

Enriched user interface (UI): clear, fresh and social!

Some of you pointed to us that the News page looked great but a bit overwhelming due to the amount of information displayed.

We listened to your comments and as a result, we are coming back with many improvements! To list a few:

Revamped Leaderboard. It will show positions and names but it will allow you to quickly expand to see further details (likelevel (NEW!), points, number of badges and number of trophies for each player).

Clear position. In CRMGamified® 2013 your position now appears in one place, the new leaderboard, that automatically expands allowing you to easy compare you results with your peers’.

CRMGamified New Leaderboard and Position indicator

Improved social features. You will be able to keep up to date on the CRMGamified® news in a clear fashion. We introduced several improvements like:

New date and time formats (in more social oriented way, like ’10 mins ago’ , ‘yesterday at ..’)

Many other fine adjustments to size of comment areas and fonts

CRMGamified – Improved social features

…and you will also find many more improvements in other areas like User page, Team Profile, Configuration, Resources and more.

CRMGamified® native mobile applications for Android & iOS!

YES, you read it well. We are also introducing our new tool for mobile users. Now, your sales people will be happier than ever to use Dynamics CRM to track their activity while on the road. They will be now able to earn points for visiting customers, registering their phone calls, text messages, e-mails and appointments while on the go.

No other application on the market will provide such power as a quick navigation of your frequently used entities [Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, Quotes, Orders, Invoices] +keeping up to date with CRMGamified® news, leaderboard+ direct text messaging/emails/call tracking + map location + calendar synchronization + offline work, among other cool features.

CRMGamified Leaderboard in the new native mobile apps!

Based on the feedback from our early adopters, CRMGamified® mobile application has more than 85% of the most common features that other mobile vendors offer, but with the unique and incredible advantages of having CRMGamified® on the go (for no additional cost).

CRMGamified Dynamics CRM Mobile client

If you would like to learn more about this new, innovative interface or try a demo, just follow this link [click here].

Levels

Now it will be possible to set different levels of mastership based on number of accumulated points. Each level will be clear reflection of progress, reputation and status of every player.

CRMGamified – levels of mastership

Default levels are introduced as:

Novice

Problem Solver

Expert

Master

Visionary

…but of course, you will be able to completely customize these titles and minimum number of points required for each level.

Unsurpassed flexibility, reward by any action and any criteria in your business process

This is one of my favorite features that will provide you with the greatest gamification configuration flexibility ever seen in Microsoft® Dynamics CRM. It will allow rewarding users by any criteria and any action defined by your business process (reflected in CRM workflows and dialogs).

I am extremely happy to be able to offer you this feature. I witnessed how our customers are using it and the power it gives them. It is absolutely awesome. You will love this feature too!

Rewarding with different number of points and badges depending on revenue of closed deals

Rewarding with bonus points for closing support cases (within a set time or during the first call)

Rewarding by levels of interest generated by a campaign (number of responses or clicks)

Rewarding by just following correctly the steps define by company business processes

…and the list can go on and on!

Simplified upgrade process.

We keep the CRM system administrators in mind when developing our solution. The upgrade process is as simple as just one click. After importing the new CRMGamified® 2013 solution into your Dynamics CRM, open the CRMGamified® solution configuration page and click on “Install Updates” button. This will automatically upgrade your system. That’s all!

Install CRMGamified Updates

You may want to press Ctrl + F5 and go to Settings->CRMGamified->Levels to modify and/or just publish the default Levels configuration as that is the new sitemap option in this release.

Detailed steps on how to upgrade are available in our Support & Resources page here.

Simplified licensing model

In order to simplify our customer choice of the solution we combined them all into two editions only, for Online and for On-premises implementation, both filled with complete set of features.

So, good news for you all! You do not have to make a choice. You will GET IT ALL!. All the power and flexibility in CRMGamified® for everybody!

…and much more!

It is impossible to tell you in this post about everything we included in the CRMGamified® 2013 release. I have barely scraped the surface. Here are few more features to whet your appetite:

Game Reset. With just one button click on the Solution configuration page, you will be able to reset all scores and start the new game.

3D Charts. All the charts we include out of the box for managers are now enhanced with rich 3D features.

Game progress banner. The notification banner displayed on every entity form, now talks to you in first person, congratulating you when you accomplish something.

Many improvements in wording and messages.

All bugs reported up to date by customers and early adopters have been addressed and fixed.

Several optimizations and performance improvements.

Crash report functionality was enhanced to help up to improve our product and your experience.

CRMGamified Dashboards for Managers

#1 in Features. #1 in Experience. #1 in Customer Service.

CRMGamified® is recommended by Microsoft® MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals), by other Microsoft® team members, CRM user groups and community sites, by the press, industry magazines and books, and by social networks.

It already offered the most complete set of features and unique flexibility based on feedback from the global market place, and now, with the CRMGamified® 2013 release reinforces our market leadership position and places our gamification solution in a completely uncharted territory.

And you will also be happy to learn that…we are not only ranked as #1 solution on the market by the Feature set but also by the ClientExperience and Customer Service. Our CRMGamified® Solution Introduction Program (GSIP) is the complete package. Our gamification specialists assist you with every step in the process, from the first demo, to installation, configuration and final solution adjustments specific to your organization. In addition, our support team is always ready to assist you with any problem or to answer any question you may have. They also monitor and listen to feedback coming from the CRM or gaming community and providing invaluable feedback to our developers.

Interested in learning more?

Not a partner yet? Do not miss the opportunity of partnering with us and gaining a unique compelling competitive advantage over your competition! Just click here to learn more about our Partner program.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter @crmgamified to keep up with our latest news, industry trends and events.

It has been months of getting a lot of feedback from this wonderful community, months of exciting and challenging goals, months of having the honor to lead an extraordinary professional team.

This week, we reached a very important milestone, announcing the availability of CRMGamified® Release Candidate version☺ .

You have no idea of how hard and how passionately we all worked for this, to deliver a product that makes you love it, not only because of the problems it addresses but also because of how it addresses them, how it looks, how it performs.

Go ahead! Download it now!. It’s still FREE ☺. You will receive an e-mail containing a download link as well as a link to a live demo in which you will be able to see how it all works from the end user’s perspective, without the need of installing anything.

Note: use Internet Explorer 7, 8 or 9 by now. Full cross-browser support will be provided in RTM version

Simplified installation and configuration

Installation and configuration experience has been completely revamped based on your feedback and an extraordinary work from our development team.

A new configuration web page is provided so you can set up CRMGamified more intuitively, just one click away to start playing if using the out of the box default gamification rules.

1 – New completely revamped configuration experience

2 – The new configuration process

3 – In order to see the new real time notifications bar in your CRM forms, you must Publish All changes.

Hope you love the new approach. However, I think there may be some room for improvement as it usually happens, so feel welcome to leave us your suggestions below.

Real time notifications and feedback

In Beta version we launched Users and Teams Leaderboards, where you were able to see your progress as individual and as part of a team, compare with others and so on.

In this new release I am really excited to announce what I call the ‘vedette’ of all new features: in-forms real time feedback of your progress as well as your peers, non-intrusive, contextual.

Let’s suppose you recently performed a rewarded action (i.e. qualified a lead) or some of your peers did. Now, according to your preferences, you will be notified of the points, badges or achievements you or your peers just gained, in a non-intrusive notification bar at the top of the form :

4 – The new in-forms real time feedback notification bar.

You will be able to see the 10 (ten) most recent posts and expand / collapse / navigate through them as desired:

5- Notification bar in expanded mode. You can quickly observe your progress as well as you peers’, navigate through the posts, goto CRMGamified® home page to see more posts, adjust your settings or even close the bar if wanted.

You also have the possibility to click on the user and congratulate, comment on his / her wall (available only in Web interface).

In addition, you always have the chance to close the notification bar by pressing ‘Close’ (it will show up again next time you open the form of an entity participating in CRMGamified).

6 – If you don’t like it or need it, you can always close the notification bar by pressing ‘Close’.

Whether you like to see real time feedback and from whom is completely up to you, configurable through My CRMGamified® Preferences page:

7 – Setting up your real time notifications preferences.

If you choose ‘Show real time notifications = Off’ , you won’t see the notification bar anymore on any form.

Localization (officially available in Spanish)

At this point, we can proudly say that we have a completely localizable platform, covering all areas of the product (from installation and administration up to awards, messages, final users pages, among others).

Following your requests, our first language fully supported up to date is Spanish. ☺

8 – CRMGamified® Configuration Page in Spanish.

9 – CRMGamified® User Preferences Page in Spanish.

We got downloads from many, many countries and regions, so we would like to hear your voice on which language or languages should be next first class citizens on our product. Please, feel welcome to leave us a comment or contact us directly to let us know your localization needs!

Improvements in ‘My CRMGamified® Preferences’

Good news! You do not need to go anymore to Activity Feeds What’s new page in order to set up your profile picture. Now, you can do it easily from ‘My CRMGamified® Preferences’ page:

We invested in several other improvements on this page as well. For instance, we are including pictures to help you better understand and choose your preferences, you can now set up CRMGamified News page as your home and you can specify which notifications make sense for you to see in the new Real Time Notifications feature.

Resources

Can I create my custom rules? For my custom entities? Can I create gamification rules for my goals? Can I create my own awards? Can I choose who plays and who doesn’t?

You’re lucky: the answer for all these questions is ‘YES’. But, where do you do that? To help address this, we are including a ‘Resources’ area where you can find these most frequent tasks, some meaningful screenshots and links to the areas in the product to accomplish them.

11 – The new Resources page.,

Cross-browser and Polaris support

We followed very closely the changes introduced in Polaris (December 2012 Service Update / UR12) mainly the ones related to the new supported browsers for Microsoft® Dynamics CRM 2011.

While we still have some known compatibility issues (mostly in User Profile and Team Profile pages), we are very happy about the cross-browser tests results from our QA team, trying CRMGamified® in Internet Explorer 10, Firefox and Chrome (Safari has not been fully tested yet).

Full compatibility with all supported browsers is one of our highest priorities for the final release planned for this Q1 2013 (first week of March).

Note that new UX forms are not supported as they do not support javascript customizations yet.

..and there is more…

All bugs reported by you have been addressed and fixed.

A ton of improvements in usability, design, layout and look & feel.

We faced and addressed scenarios with distributed teams among different regions and time zones. Now, a common time zone must to be set up for the game and all periods (i.e. this month, this week, last month) leaderboards are calculated based on this setting.

When enabling any user for CRMGamified®, the role CRMGamified® User is automatically granted to her / him. No need to set it up manually anymore.

Error log included in the platform by design so in the event of an exception (hopefully not), troubleshooting information is gathered so as to help you and our support team to address it more quickly.

Limitations & Constraints

Some limitations and constraints to consider are:

This version is NOT backward compatible with previous Betas of CRMGamified®. In case some beta version is installed, you need to completely uninstall it before installing this new version.

Several inconsistences may be caused in case updated instead of uninstalling and installing again.

If you don’t want to lose points you already may have gained enjoying Beta, remember you have the chance to grant them manually to each user or team. From the form of any of these entities you will find the ribbon button ‘Add or Remove Points’

We have some compatibility issues with IE10 and other non-IE browsers that we are still addressing for the final release.

New UX forms are not supported as they do not support javascript customizations yet.

Roadmap

We are committed to release final commercial version by Q1 2013 (first week of March).

In essence, no more new features are planned for this release but completing overall stabilization, achieving cross-browser support and including subscription / licensing management.

I want to thank you all of you who has sent to us feedback either on new features needs or potential bugs. We listened to you, included many of your feedback in this release and have an interesting backlog and challenges for next ones.

I encourage you to leave us your feedback in a comment below or contact us by clicking here.

Partner program

We received several requests for partnering with us and are definitely very proud of this as it means you are seeing something unique in our product. With the public availability of CRMGamified® Release Candidate we are launching a communication for all partners this week.

So, stay tuned and if you did not register yet for becoming partner, you can do it now here.

About Us

Founded in 2011, and having presence in the US, Canada and Latin America, CRMGamified® provides modern technology to help companies improve sales and service performance by leveraging gamification.

We offer a metrics-driven approach and CRM add-ons to promote behaviors that lead to substantial revenue growth, increased employee engagement, and improved productivity of outbound teams across the globe.